Thom Yorke

by Trevor Baker

  Nevertheless it’s a sign of the cachet his name still had, within or without Radiohead, that on release it went straight in at Number 2 in the Billboard chart and Number 3 in the British charts. He’d reached the enviable point where enough people were paying attention to Radiohead’s vast internet presence, their own website and the many unofficial sites, that it scarcely mattered if the mainstream ignored what he was doing. People would still hear about it directly from him.

  It helped that when he released ‘Harrowdown Hill’, he commissioned an equally extraordinary video to go with it from American stop-motion animator Chel White. Thom had seen a film of Chel’s called Passage and he was struck by the way it juxtaposed dream-like images of people underwater alongside images of war and atrocities. This was what he wanted for ‘Harrowdown Hill’ – something that captured the song’s mixture of rage, grief and strange beauty. As always, though, he gave the director a completely free reign to create something that was a work of art in its own right.

  “It was a relief to write a treatment for a song that I really liked,” Chel told the author for this book. “It’s hard when you hear a song and it doesn’t give you any images and then you have to struggle to find them. With this one I didn’t have that problem at all. I maybe had the opposite problem that there were too many images. I talked with [commissioning editor] Dilly about doing a collage technique that was very frenetic with many images flashing but I realised, I think we both realised, that that wasn’t the way to go.”

  Instead the video starts with a silhouette of an eagle flying over a landscape, which initially is the beautiful English countryside. Then, as silhouetted hands grab at the eagle’s wings, it flies along a motorway and over an industrial city before scenes from the Poll Tax Riot of 1990 are spliced in. It culminates with a scene of Thom, wearing a shirt and tie, sinking through the water of a black pool. The way it mixes politics and something much more surreal fitted the song perfectly.

  “As soon as I heard the song, I knew it couldn’t be directly about the David Kelly case,” says Chel. “We’d have to work with images that would indirectly relate to it, rather than refer to it directly. It’s looking at the larger subject of secrecy and government control in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and everything else. To me, the video is more of a call to consciousness than a call to arms. I don’t like to hit people over the head with metaphors but the eagle is partly a metaphor for David Kelly.”

  For the underwater scenes Thom flew to Los Angeles. It must have been an uncomfortable reminder of his experiences with the ‘No Surprises’ shoot eight years previously. He was weighted down and dropped into a deep pool that was painted black. “It was about twenty feet deep and the last thing they’d done in there was drop a Hummer in and shoot it from underneath,” says Chel. “Which was probably about as far away from what we were doing as possible.”

  For somebody with slight claustrophobia, it was a daunting prospect but, although it proved easier than ‘No Surprises’, Thom still found it difficult. The pool was painted black, as normal swimming pools never are, and so it was very easy to become disorientated underwater.

  “I did get a sense that he was pushing himself and he did get a little frustrated,” says Chel. “I think he was rather tentative about the whole idea of jumping in, but it was about him addressing that fear. I didn’t really know to what degree he was comfortable or uncomfortable with the concept of being weighted down and dropped into a very deep pool. I think it was something that, at first, he wasn’t all that comfortable with. I think we did eighteen takes and the last three were just gold. Over the course of it he got more and more comfortable and I think by the end of it he could have been a pearl diver! He was very much a perfectionist. When he got to the point when he was comfortable with it, he’d look at the takes and say, ‘OK, I’ll try it differently this time.’”

  One very underrated skill that Thom has had throughout his career, from his time in Headless Chickens to the present day, is the ability to step back and let talented people get on with what they’re good at. He admitted that he didn’t have the eye for video direction but, along with trusted commissioning editor Dilly Gent, he seemed to be able to find people whose vision matched his. Chel White says that he was given all the freedom he needed to make the video for ‘Harrowdown Hill’.

  “It was ideal in most ways,” he says. “He liked my ideas, we talked about it a little bit and we met up, and we went about doing it. There wasn’t very much editorial control on his part. Which was wonderful. I think what he was looking for was an artist to see it through. It was a very satisfying project for me because there was so much of my vision in it.”

  The ‘Harrowdown Hill’ video was the only part of the campaign for The Eraser which had any of the hallmarks of old Radiohead album campaigns. XL would probably have liked him to play a few shows to promote it but, by then, he was back on the road with Radiohead, road-testing the songs that would appear on their next album, In Rainbows.

  21

  IN RAINBOWS

  In August 2005, using his characteristic unpunctuated style, Thom Yorke wrote on the Radiohead website that, “there are giant waves of self doubt crashing over me and if i could alleviate this with a simple pill … i think i would.”

  One such pill, it turned out, was The Eraser album but, for a long time, it wasn’t clear whether that would be enough. “There was a lot of me trying to pick myself up off the floor,” he told the New York Times afterwards. “Because I really sort of dropped – what’s the word? Sunk … dropped down and went into this big lull and couldn’t do anything. There’s a lot of internal monologue stuff going on.”

  Even after he’d got the agitated beats of The Eraser out of his system it wasn’t easy to go back to the frequently torturous working methods of Radiohead. In an interview with Julian Marshall of NME that they did at the start of the recording process for the next band album, Thom went back to a very familiar theme, that Radiohead itself had a kind of personality. Sometimes it was a friend and sometimes it wasn’t. By that point he was describing it, rather bitterly, as a monster.

  “Personally, one of the things I find hardest is being part of the whole Radiohead thing,” he said, “and I’m not really interested in that anymore. I’m trying to work out what exactly it is that keeps me wanting to do it. None of us really want to be part of that band, like that anymore, just because it’s a particular monster. And you don’t want to be in this situation where you’re just feeding the monster. It should be the other way around, whatever that means!”

  However, doing nothing wasn’t an option either. He’d spent a while outside of the Radiohead loop and found that he didn’t exactly know how to do anything else. The band had been in his life since he before was twenty years old. The only solution was to go back in the studio but this time, as Thom saw it, to do things properly. Finally. If their last album, Hail To The Thief, had been an experiment in just cranking out a record as quickly as possible, this one would herald a return to their meticulous perfectionism.

  So, in February 2005, it was the same old story. The band returned to their rehearsal rooms with the usual simple agenda: to do things completely differently to the previous album. For the first few months, they were essentially just deciding what they wanted to do. There was no real progress. Then, on August 17, they went into a studio for the first time since 2004. On day four they finally reported progress, but it would be their last burst of optimism for some time.

  Thom was distracted by numerous other things. There was his work for Friends Of The Earth, the request to meet Tony Blair, the recording of The Eraser and, more importantly, two small children. Later on, Jonny Greenwood would note that, between them, they’d had six children since they were last Radiohead. Still, by September 30 they did at least have one, semi-ironic sign of progress – a school-style blackboard covered in song titles. Just as during the Kid A sessions they had dozens of ideas, but they weren’t sure what to do with them.

 
; In October 2005, Colin reported on their website blog Dead Air Space that, during a week-long recording session, they’d been recording a song a day. At the end of the month, Ed added that he thought they’d got ‘Bodysnatchers’ and Thom said that some of the recording blitz had been “great fun.”

  They also had an actual, proper song out there and available for fans to buy. It was their latest contribution to the ‘War Child’ charity and a follow-up to 1996’s ‘Lucky’. A beautiful, piano-led ballad called ‘I Want None Of This’, the track offered few clues to what would come next but it didn’t in any way suggest that this was a band on the verge of falling apart. It was very slow and simple, with backing vocals cooing gently over Thom’s unadorned vocal, like a Welsh voice choir.

  However, when Thom listened to the rest of the tracks they’d recorded, he had severe doubts about the direction they were heading in. In January 2006, he decided that they needed to get serious. They’d spent the best part of a year getting nowhere. Nigel Godrich was away producing Beck so they brought in the services of producer Mark ‘Spike’ Stent and he immediately took them to task for their lack of focus. Initially it seemed like just what they needed, “to stop answering the phones and thinking of excuses to leave the building, instead get on with it,” as Thom wrote on Dead Air Space. They felt that they’d perhaps become too comfortable with Nigel Godrich. It was too easy for them to repeat themselves because they knew exactly what worked and what didn’t. Stent was best known as one of the most successful mixers in the business but he’d also produced big albums for Björk and Massive Attack among many others.

  When he came to Radiohead’s studio, the new producer was surprised to see that there was, in Thom’s words, “shit all over the place”. There were broken instruments on the floor and everything was completely disorganised and random. He immediately set about sorting everything out until Thom said it, “now looks like NASA”. He made them realise how lucky they were to have such an array of equipment available. They had everything they possibly needed, not to mention all the time in the world. But that was part of the problem. Without a record label, without an A&R, they had so much freedom that they were paralysed. Thom compared it to the situation of Roadrunner in the cartoon – running over the edge of the cliff and suddenly looking down.

  Again he was finding himself slightly scared of his instruments as he had been before Kid A. They had too much time to think. There was nobody checking up on them and no definite release date for whatever they might finally produce. They didn’t even know what they would do with the album when it was finished.

  “I think it’s a nutty situation to be in to have no definite release system,” admitted Thom to NME. “It’s really liberating not to feel part of the record company structure. It should be an extremely positive place to be in, but it’s also an extremely strange situation to be in. One of the things you discover really quickly when you discover you’re not committed to anything is that you need some level of commitment because otherwise you just start fucking about, which is what we did for ages.”

  In the first quarter of 2006, they had to reluctantly accept that they still weren’t ready. The studio reports in February and March were full of gloom. The best they could come up with after one unspecified crisis was that they were “shaky but intact”. But by March things hadn’t got much better. Things were as bad as they’d been at the worst moments of The Bends and the early days of the Kid A sessions.

  They reluctantly told Mark Stent that it wasn’t working. They were so used to Nigel Godrich now that they found it difficult to cope with Spike’s different working methods. “What we need is someone who is what I’d call a tutor – who is a guy you’re answerable to,” Thom said to NME.

  It was ironic that that man was apparently Nigel. The reason they’d worked with him in the first case was that he was more like a peer than the traditional producer as school master. But he was one of the few people that they trusted to tell them whether something was good or bad. They had a desperate craving for good advice, combined with a stubborn refusal to accept it from anybody outside their close circle.

  “Working with Spike Stent felt a bit too much like there was an adult present,” said Jonny to The Word magazine. “With Nigel we can reminisce about old ZX Spectrum games. He’s our generation. It feels more like we’re in it together.”

  “We need an A&R man,” contradicted Colin Greenwood, “for the first time in our career we don’t have a record contract and we need an A&R man. We don’t want a record deal, but we want their A&R.”

  With no release date lined up, they booked another tour, just as they had done halfway through recording so many times before. It was a deadline of sorts. And instead of playing in the studio, it meant they could just go back to their rehearsal studio and practise without having to worry about recording the results.

  “Rather than it being a nightmare,” Thom said to the New York Times, “it was really, really good fun, because suddenly everyone is being spontaneous and no one’s self-conscious because you’re not in the studio. So it was really good just hanging out and working for about four or five hours a day. It felt like being sixteen again.”

  “The key thing in actually propelling it forward was Nigel coming back into the process,” said Phil Selway. “The reality when we got in there was it still wasn’t good enough. We really had to raise our standards quite a lot.”

  Some of the songs, such as ‘Nude’, they’d had for years. It was the same old problem. They often couldn’t finish ideas. It was too much pressure to say, ‘OK, that’s it, that one’s done’. Thom always preferred to work on something fresh. The new ideas and the new songs were always more exciting than painstakingly putting the finishing touches to something in the studio.

  Fortunately the reaction to the songs when they played them live gave them another boost. Sold-out crowds around the world were almost as enthusiastic about the new stuff as they were about the old. The first show was Thom and Jonny’s Friends Of The Earth benefit at Koko in London. It was a relatively small venue for them and tickets were soon going on eBay for ridiculous amounts until Thom was moved to request that anyone selling their ticket give 30% of the proceeds to the charity. The shows that followed were some of the biggest, or at least the longest, that they’d done. At the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee, USA, they played 28 songs from all sections of their career.

  At another show in America they were bemused to discover that one of President Bush’s daughters was in attendance, complete with retinue of bodyguards. As they came to the last song, they saw a commotion at the back of the hall and only later did they discover that it was fans taking exception to her security guards attempt to push past everybody to leave.

  There were more smiles on tour than there had been for a long time. They played thirteen new songs on the road and the process simultaneously sharpened them and gave the band confidence that what they were doing was worthwhile. Inevitably, the thirteen songs were soon available for free all over the internet. But Thom didn’t mind.

  “The first time we ever did ‘All I Need,’ Boom! It was up on YouTube,” he said to the New York Times. “I think it’s fantastic. The instant you finish something, you’re really excited about it, you’re really proud of it, you hope someone’s heard it, and then, by God, they have. It’s OK because it’s on a phone or a video recorder. It’s a bogus recording, but the spirit of the song is there, and that’s good. At that stage that’s all you need to worry about.”

  Radiohead were still humble enough to be flattered that people wanted to bootleg their songs and they appreciated the fact that people were able to listen to them before they came to the shows. And the songs were evolving every time they played them so the bootlegs captured a sound that would never be heard again. The only downside was that these versions of the songs weren’t quite what the band intended the world to hear. “There’s a compliment there,” Thom said to Rolling Stone’s Mark Binelli, “the fact that people want to get a
hold of what you’ve done. But it’s not the definitive version, if the ends are chopped off, if you haven’t made the choice to do it yourself.”

  After the tour, in October 2006, they accepted the inevitable and brought Nigel Godrich back to finally capture the magic of the live shows. But initially they found that they’d played the songs so often that they were bored with them. They seemed stale. “We played them eighty times live or so, and we’d rehearsed them to death,” said Ed O’Brien. “It just didn’t happen when we got back into the studio initially.” It was a galling reminder of Brian Eno’s old adage: “Whatever worked last time, never do it again.”

  Nevertheless Nigel suggested that they try another old trick, recording out of the traditional studio environment. This time it was to be Tottenham Court House in Marlborough, Wiltshire. Tottenham Court House wasn’t the lavishly appointed estate of Jane Seymour. It was a decrepit, crumbling mansion built in the 1830s. They couldn’t even live there. They hired camper vans and lived in the grounds, recording in the library and playing cover versions at night to get back the joy of playing together. And, just as there had been on previous albums, there was one moment when everything suddenly clicked into place. They had a meeting in the library and began a ritual that they’d had since Abingdon, everybody playing percussion to try and loosen up. The result was the delicate, inspired clatter of ‘Reckoner’. It was a song they’d first played live in 2001 but it had never sounded like this. Thom described it later as a “first-thing-in-the-morning” song and he gave it one of his most beautiful vocal performances, a falsetto which rises way above the background noise. Like ‘My Iron Lung’ on The Bends this was the song where they at last started to feel they were getting somewhere again.